sting sometimes, with an uncanny ability to expose the lies we tell ourselves and penetrate beyond the carefully crafted exteriors of our lives.
Mostly, of course, we don’t wish to be disrupted from comfort, even if that comfort is an illusion and so we resent being exposed, challenged, and corrected, even by someone we would at least theoretically understand to be the Son of God. So we create exceptions, economias, and sometimes just flat out ignore what we don’t want to hear. Perhaps that’s why we sometimes leave the Bible on the shelf, pious in its placement but largely unread. We’re afraid of what we’re going to discover, afraid of what challenge may come our way if we open it and take what Christ says seriously.
Yet the wounds our Lord may give us are not the wounds of an enemy but the wound that a surgeon must necessarily do for the greater healing. Within all of us are spiritual cancers of various kinds, and all of them left unchecked would certainly take not just our lives but our souls as well. They have to go and if we are willing to accept the diagnosis and the treatment we can recover. If we choose to ignore the path of healing then we will lose the very life we think we’re trying to protect.
An enemy will always tell you what you want to hear but a friend will, when necessary, speak the truth even if that truth is troubling, or by our thin skinned society’s obsession with constant affirmation, offensive. When Jesus gets in our faces, despite what we may think at the time, he’s neither angry nor trying to hurt us. Rather, he’s trying to help us find the life we were actually meant to have in a world of illusions so real we often mistake them for fact. There is wisdom if we understand this.
The Beautiful Path 